Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Stage Version

With Balkan Erotic Epic, Marina Abramović presents one of the most radical and at the same time sensuous works of her career. The great pioneer of performance art returns to her roots – unleashing a new, collective energy out of it. Inspired by the erotic rituals and folk myths of the Balkans, her homeland, the artist creates a polyphonic hymn to life force: raw, archaic, overwhelming.

Balkan Erotic Epic is more than a performance – it is a conjuring. Building on her 2005 video work of the same name, Abramović unfolds a powerful new work exploring female energy, shame, desire, and the relationship between body and history. Premiered as an immersive performance in Manchester in 2025, the Performing Arts Season will now present the stage version of Balkan Erotic Epic in Germany for the first time.

Singers, dancers and musicians bring to life a sequence of scenes oscillating between celebration, prayer and liberation. Bodies enact a feverish ritual, writhing on the ground in a desperate call for fertility. Women massage their bare breasts to awaken the earth, or bare themselves under the open sky to ward off storms. Here, eroticism appears not as allure but as primal force, a language beyond shame, morality and control.

As in earlier key works – the physically extreme cleansing ritual Balkan Baroque (1997) or the silent encounter The Artist is Present (2010) – Abramović probes the boundaries between body, consciousness and audience. But where she once confronted her audience with a quiet, singular presence, here she unfolds a collective physical experience of a new dimension and complexity.

Balkan Erotic Epic connects to the spiritual and political power of Abramović’s oeuvre while ushering it into a new phase: more communal, sensuous and ritualistic. She returns to the myths and tensions of her homeland, where eroticism, pain and belief intersect. It is a return to origins – and simultaneously a departure toward a future in which the erotic becomes a source of insight, healing and power.

Born in Belgrade in 1946, Marina Abramović is a central figure in performance art. Since the 1970s, she has rigorously explored the limits of body, pain, endurance and presence. In her early works, she put her own life and body at risk (Rhythm 0, 1974). Together with the artist Ulay, she developed intense duo performances exploring intimacy, connection and separation. One of her most recognised works worldwide is The Artist is Present, in which she sat silently across from visitors at MoMA for hours – an iconic moment of still encounter and radical presence.